In step with the mission of the journal, this issue represents a wide range of fields and subjects, including performance studies (dance), architecture, art history, poetics, medieval literature, history of printing and engraving, the decorative arts, movement studies, history of taste and judgment, object-oriented studies, intellectual history, new media and technology studies, composition studies, mysticism, philosophy, botany, the history of books, history of science, the vegetal, the animal, theology, etc. What all of the essays have in common, in the words of the special issue’s co-editors, Jen Boyle and Martin Foys, has something to do with

our dependence on the recursive circuitry and tangle of technologies, bodies, narratives, spaces, and mediating technics, across historical periods and across literary, scientific, philosophical, and theological modes of expression.

And in some sympathy with the aims of our own blog here [In The Middle] and with postmedieval’s objective to trouble and complicate the supposed divides between past and present times, Jen and Martin also write, relative to the aims of this issue,

. . . the casting of new media studies as itself “new” raises troubling questions. To what extent is mediation ever “new”? Indeed, as the medhyo at the center of “medieval” would suggest, mediation appears as an always incomplete “middling” and “meddling” – always becoming, to itself and something other than itself; a troubling, meddling, unstable go-between. This second sense of becoming-media extends questions about the mediating artifact within its historical context to include issues of embodied and historical temporality; periodization as “meddling”; the feedback loop of technics-consciousness; the glance, glimpse, and touch of the mediated image as political and aesthetic affect; and the unstable registers of the trans/hyper-mediation of multiple past-present-futures.

We invite EVERYONE to join us in what is, for now, an EXPERIMENT in the crowd review of the papers listed above, and which will extend from today, July 16th, through Thursday, September 15th. We have set up the crowd review on a very user-friendly weblog-styled WordPress website, which allows you to comment as little or as much as you like, on one or more [or any portion] of the papers, and you can find everything you need to know to participate as a reviewer here:

Meta

The BABEL Working Group, founded in 2004, is a collective and desiring-assemblage of scholar-itinerants in North America, the UK, Australia and beyond who are working to develop new co-disciplinary, nomadic, and convivial confraternities among the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the fine arts in order to formulate and practice new critical humanisms and post-humanisms. It is our aim to create a more present-minded premodern studies and a more historically-minded cultural studies, and to also build temporary shelters for intellectual vagabonds.